The porch light is off. Mom’s note waits on the counter—meatloaf in the fridge, don’t be a stranger, love you—and I eat standing up, the way you do when your body’s home and your head isn’t. The house is roomy with everyone gone, echoes of old arguments and good birthdays tucked in corners. I take a shower, scrub until the day comes off, then stare at the ceiling fan as if it owes me answers.
Three weeks. Camp. Noise. The life I built from muscle and grit and Sunday night noise. It’s still there—still mine, if Iwant it. But the image of stepping into a stadium now comes with a second overlay: a white tower against a navy sky, a woman on a porch, and a beam of light turning, as if it remembers me by heart.
I grab my keys again. I don’t even try to pretend I’m not going back.
The lighthouse is a geometry of shadow and glow when I pull up. The beam sweeps slowly, catching the edge of the railing, the brass at the door handle, and the curl of a fern in a pot Bailey swears she forgets to water, yet it thrives anyway. I knock once and immediately feel ridiculous. It’s late. This is reckless.
The door opens fast, like she was already there. She’s barefoot in an old T-shirt and soft shorts, hair twisted up, glasses sliding down her nose. Her mouth shapes my name like she’s been practicing.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I say.
“Me either.” She steps back. “Come in.”
Inside, the shop is dim, the kind of quiet you whisper in out of respect. She flips a small lamp on behind the counter, and it throws a warm circle at our feet. The place smells like paper and citrus and her shampoo. It’s criminal.
“I made tea,” she says, like we’ve always had midnight tea. She pours and hands me a mug. Our fingers meet like they’ve planned it. “Did your shoulder hurt?”
“Only in the parts that aren’t the shoulder.” I set the mug down and rub a hand over the back of my neck. “Marcus says I’m good to throw. I keep imagining every version of what happens after.”
“Which one makes your chest tighten?” she asks, honest as a scalpel.
“All of them.” I huff out a breath, try a smile. “You ever wish for two bodies?”
She tips her head. “One for fear. One for joy.”
“Yeah.”
“I used to,” she says. “Then I realized it was one body either way. Might as well let it hold both.”
I sit with that. Too simple. Exactly right. The kettle clicks softly back to sleep as if it approves of the sentiment.
She moves around the counter and stands beside me instead of across from me, shoulder to shoulder. Not touching. Notnottouching. We face the rows of spines like a small congregation at a safe church.
She listens, steady. “Tell me what you’d miss if you stayed.”
“Hotel rooms at two a.m. where the minibar is the friend that wants to ruin you.” I let out a laugh that isn’t nice. “The way people love you when you’re useful.” A long breath. “The part where I don’t have to ask what matters because the schedule decides.”
Her silence is not passive; it’s shelter. “And if you stayed here?” she asks.
“Salt air,” I say, too fast. “My mom’s porch. Rowan pretending he hates me. Fixing a door that actually stays fixed. Reading to kids who think the otter is real.” I look at her. “You.”
She doesn’t flinch. She does look down, like the floor might take the heat out of the moment if we ask politely. “Those aren’t small things.”
“I know.” I take a deep breath. “I’m trying to be the kind of man who doesn’t make the big things sound small so they fit in his old life.”
The clock ticks. The beam turns. I can feel the exact place our bodies know we could step wrong and choose not to, and it makes the air taste like lightning.
“Come upstairs,” she says suddenly, voice low. “I have”—her mouth tugs—“a loose window latch. Before the storm tomorrow.”
I should grin. I don’t. “Yeah,” I say softly. “Let’s fix it.”
We climb the spiral, the narrow stairs forcing us closer than is safe. My hand rests to her left on the rail, hers to my right, and our knuckles pass each other every third step like a metronome. The lantern room is a planet of glow and shadow, the rug a faded map of somewhere we haven’t gone yet. She leads me into the attached apartment and points at a window above the small kitchen sink. “There,” she says, relief-shy from her own excuse.
I check the latch, the play in the hinge, and the gap where the frame bowed. “Shim will do,” I murmur because it’s easier to speak about lumber than all the pent-up desire rushing through me.
She stands beside me, holding the flashlight, her arm brushing mine every time she shifts the beam. “Do you ever worry,” she says, and the light wobbles across my wrist, “that if you pick wrong, the other life will punish you?”
“All the time.” I wedge the shim with careful pressure and feel the latch catch. “But I worry more that if I don’t pick, both lives will.”
